Nicholas Melady
Jr. (1845 - December 7, 1869) was a convicted murderer
from Huron County, Ontario, Canada. Melady was the last
person to be publicly executed in Canada.
He was hanged on December 7, 1869, on
the outside wall of a jail located in Goderich, Ontario,
for the murder of his father, Nicholas Melady Senior and
his stepmother Ellen.
The murders are believed to have been
committed on the evening of June 6, 1868, on a farm in
the present day municipality of Huron East, south of the
current community of Seaforth, Ontario.
Melady's trial was surrounded by
controversy at the time, with allegations of perjury,
lost and planted evidence, as well as the unusual use of
a female police informant, who posed as a criminal and
feigned affection for Melady while he was imprisoned, in
an attempt to gain a confession from him. The informant,
named in records as "Jenny Smith", was the wife of a
local police officer.
During the course of the
investigation into the crime, seven other members of the
Melady family, as well as two other male individuals,
were initially jailed as suspects and later released.
Melady's execution occurred several
hours in advance of the officially announced time it was
to occur in an attempt to avoid the civil disorder that
sometimes accompanied public hangings. It is reported
that a crowd of several thousand people were present at
the jail at the originally announced time of the
execution, many of whom are reported to have shouted
their disapproval of the altered schedule of events.
On January 1, 1870, three weeks after
Melady was hanged, a Canadian federal government Order-in-Council
came into effect that banned all future public
executions in Canada.
Source
Melady, John (2005). Double Trap: The
Last Public Hanging In Canada. Dundern Press. ISBN
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